NUCLEAR AND PARTICLE physics is a branch of physics that studies the elementary constituents of matter and the interactions between them. It is also called high-energy physics because many elementary particles don't exist under normal circumstances in nature but can be created and detected during energetic collisions of other particles, as occur in particle colliders. Modern nuclear and particle physics experiments achieve their goals by studying the emission direction, energy, and mass of the produced particles when accelerated beam particles hit target particles. Experimental facilities use various kinds of detectors to generate the raw data used to calculate and analyze the characteristics of emitted particles from the collision. Examples of such experiments include HADES and PANDA at the GSI in Germany and ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE at the CERN LHC in Switzerland. (See the "Glossary and Information Sources" sidebar.) In this article, we relate our work specifically to HADES, which investigates hadron properties inside nuclear matter.
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